Oconee County, GA Politics

If you are a gay or gay-frinedly voter in Georgia who happened to pull the G.O.P. ballot in the primary, then you should vote for Karen Handel in the run-off Tuesday.  If you think any support of gay people is somehow immoral, then you should vote for Nathan Deal. So goes the common political wisdom in the Georgia Gubernatorial run off Tuesday. Or should it? I voted for Deal, but not because I think he is the better candidate. I think he is incredibly corrupt and intolerant, and I think he will be much easier for former Governor Roy Barnes to beat in Novermber because of this baggage. I think Republican women and many politically active women of all stripes will rally around Handel if she secures the nomination, and she would probably beat Barnes in the general election. I attended the Handel rally at the Oconee County Courthouse and was genuinely surprised at the amount of seemingly moderate white folks who attended this event. I did not attend the Deal event the following day...

Former Arkansas Governor and possible Republican vice-president candidate Mike Huckabee made an off-handed comment at the NRA Convention after hearing a chair fall to the floor - "That's Barack Obama waiting to make a speech here - someone aimed a gun and him and he fell out of his chair diving to the floor." As innocent as this kind of comment might seem at first blush, this is exactly the kind of affirmation that right wing wackos with rifles need to pull the trigger in an assassination of Obama. Already today a Hispanic man who came out against a Marietta bar owner who put a picture of Curious Georgia with Obama in '08 on a shirt received a package with powder and a cross on it at his front door. The tone and rhetoric have already gone off the charts with revisionist Republican fearmongers suggesting that the presumptive Democratic nominee is an appeaser. We need to stick to the issues and figure out how to fix what is wrong with this country, not appeal to reactio...